Decisions, Decisions

I hate making decisions, almost as much as I hate housework. I hate making decisions because I'm constantly wondering if I'm making the right one and then when I do finally make a decision, I second-guess it to death. The crazy part of all this is, I rarely second-guess the decisions I make in a professional setting; I save all the craziness for my personal life.

To give an example, back when I was a freshman in college, I applied for transfer admission to the University of Virginia. I got in, and then began the angst and I mean, a serious summerful of angst to the point that the head lifeguard at the pool I was working at actually got on the PA system one evening and intoned gravely, "UMASS or UVA? UMASS or UVA?" After much back and forth, listing of pros and cons of going or staying, I was making myself and everyone around me crazy. My patient dad shelled out the deposit to UVA and to give me more time, paid tuition at UMASS as well. I finally decided that I should go to UVA based on a very simple decision: I wrote two letters of withdrawal, put them in envelopes, closed my eyes, and picked one. The letter was UMASS. I put it in the mail that day.

After I withdrew from UMASS, I broke the news to my 'old' UMASS roommate and introduced myself to my new roommate at UVA. My dad paid the UVA tuition and we made preparations to travel down to Charlottesville. A few days before we were supposed to leave, I realized I couldn't do it. I couldn't leave the great friends I'd made at UMASS and I didn't want to give up the job I'd just been hired for: assistant Arts & Living editor. I frantically called UMASS and thanks to the bureaucratic jungle that is Whitmore, they hadn't processed my withdrawal, nor had I lost my housing (my roommate, on the other hand, had made other arrangements). I begged them to rip up the envelope, and pretend they'd never gotten it. Then I called UVA and officially withdrew from there. Somewhere along the line, my dad got the second tuition back that he'd paid, and off I went blithely to UMASS, where I finished four full years.

I tell this story still to illustrate two points: 1) I can't make a decision and 2) my dad paid tuition at TWO universities so I could have more time to actually make the decision that was best for me. Now tell me, how many dads would do that, huh? I mean, *seriously*.

To this day, I wonder what would have happened if I'd gone to UVA instead of staying at UMASS. While I wonder, I don't regret staying at UMASS at all. UMASS was an awesome experience, I met great people, had a blast, and the experiences that I picked up there helped me land my very first job with Very Big Insurance Company. Not to mention, by staying at UMASS, I was able to earn two degrees -- a BA and a BBA -- in four years. I wouldn't have been able to have done that if I transferred to UVA and lost nearly half of my earned credits; I would have been lucky to receive my BBA in four years, let alone a BA as a bonus.

The thing is, since I was 19 years old, my decision making skills haven't improved that much. I'm often stymied by either the abundance of information or the lack thereof. I always want more time, and then suddenly it's crunch time and I make a snap decision. More often than not, my decisions are made emotionally, but I'd like to think there's a logical and intelligent component to all this because 9 times out of 10, the decisions I've made have been the right ones and somehow, I've got to trust in that. Everytime I come to a fork in the road, I ask myself (in the immortal words of Dale Carnegie), "What is the worst possible thing that can happen if I do A? What is the worst possible thing that can happen if I do B?" And I realize that usually the worst possible thing is nothing that I can't handle.